Constant application of hot toddies and painkillers meant that in the middle of Saturday night Kane woke up, sweating like a linebacker and feeling much better. He stepped out to look for a fresh set of sheets and noticed that the door to his guest room was ajar. His living room was tidied, a bottle of single-malt sat on the kitchen countertop, and the apartment didn’t smell of cigarettes anymore; Ellen’s flowery scent had taken over. He changed the sheets, took a shower, then went to the door of the guest room.
Her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, a comb and mirror stood on the chest of drawers, and she had put an old-fashioned alarm clock on the bedside table. She was lying on her stomach in the bed, one arm thrown above her head, presumably from moving the pillow, her head to the side, her blond hair half-covering her face.
He stood there for a moment, enjoying the squeeze of his heart as he looked at her. Whatever happened after this weekend, she was his for now.
He padded over and gently took the covers off her. When he rolled her over and picked her up, she opened one eye a crack. “Better?” she asked sleepily.
“Mm-hmm,” he said, and carried her back to his room. She was asleep again before he put her down.
• • •
Sitting at opposite ends of his enormous couch the next day, her feet against Kane’s thigh, newspapers strewn all around them, a wintry rain outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Ellen was giddy with how desperately she liked this.
The papers were full of pictures of two people the cops had arrested “in connection with” the fires. They’d each been happily tucking into turkey and stuffing at their parents’ houses on Thanksgiving. The man and woman weren’t saying much, but they had bus tickets from New Hampshire, and the cops had found a van with every kind of device needed to make explosives, mechanical or chemical, as well as two laptops, in the airport parking lot. The man had clocked in as one of the security camera installers at the plant in California. His ID had been faultless.
“If the FBI holds a press conference,” Kane said from behind his newspaper (the building’s concierge had delivered it that day), “I’ll probably have to be at it.”
Ellen said, “Uh-huh,” but a molten dread went through her. What if the journalists asked him about her? What would he say? Would he laugh her off, dismiss her to show them that nothing had changed, that there was nothing to worry about? Or would he try and rein the press back in by giving them a tidbit about his personal life, that was now her personal life, that she didn’t think she could stand him sharing?
Kane put down the paper and let his head fall back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Not too soon, I hope.”
“You’re a lot better today than yesterday.”
“Yeah. Well enough to be pissed off that I’m sick.” He rolled his eyes over to her. “Prettiest nursemaid ever.” Ellen had to smile back.
Kane looked back up at the ceiling. “Why did they do it?” he said, going back to the two suspects. “I mean, one of them was just some kid that did I.T. for us for a summer. What did we do to him? And that girl: she’s from Nebraska, for Christ’s sake. There aren’t even any trees in Nebraska. Kidding.”
And then, as if he couldn’t help asking even though he didn’t want to know the answer, he said, “Do you think Tennant will keep going?”
Henry Tennant, one of the last names on the list of ex-employees the Feds hadn’t been able to trace.
The FBI had told them that Tennant had been in the building on that day thirteen years ago when the boiler had exploded. That he’d been two rooms away from Robert Fielding. That he’d been crushed by a wall, suffered fourth-degree burns on twenty percent of his body, and third-degree on most of the rest. That two years ago he had stopped going to the doctor, stopped picking up his worker’s comp checks, stopped paying rent, and disappeared from his apartment. That a sweep of library computers in his last-known location had turned up searches for arson, chemical fires, and warehouse layouts.
“He can’t do much without his I.T. guy,” she said. “And whatever it was the girl did. And his picture’s all over the place now. He won’t be able to get anywhere near your buildings.”
Kane nodded but still looked bleak. She stretched herself out next to him at his end of the couch and wrapped her arms around his wheezy chest.
He dropped his head to hide his face in her hair. One hand was crushing the newspaper at his side. Very quietly, as if he didn’t want to say the words aloud, he said, “There were people in the mill in Bristol.”
“Who all got out,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but...” He didn’t finish the sentence. Ellen heard the thump of his heart through his chest and kept on holding tight.
Kane had spent years cultivating an image of a fearless businessman, optimistic to the point of arrogance, laughing and carefree in the face of the glaring problems the company had had when he’d taken over. He’d made it look easy to change Fielding Paper to recycled products, to explore new materials like hemp, to save hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. And he’d done it all virtually alone. From what she’d seen, the only sister that could have supported him chose to treat him like an annoying child, and his best friend was hundreds of miles away. And Ellen might be stereotyping, but she would bet he’d never discussed business with any of his previous girlfriends.
She couldn’t imagine the weight of responsibility he carried every day. And now he took every man hour that had been lost, every stick of every destroyed building, every firefighter that put themselves in danger to fight them, on himself.
He didn’t have to tell her this; she’d read between the lines of his phone conversations from California and New Hampshire. To add the idea that his employees might actually get injured, or worse, because he (as if it had been his responsibility to keep tabs on Tennant) had let someone slip between the cracks, must be unbearable to him.
How could Ellen help him when she didn’t know where she’d be in three months? When he’d spent what little time they had together worrying about media attention or her own emotional demons? When her upbringing just about forbade the kind of questions Americans seemed to find so easy to ask? She knew she was the only person within light years who could help Kane with the strain he was under, but she didn’t know how to go about it.
Casting about for something cheerful to say, she went with, “Tell me more about Carl. How long have you known him?”
“We took some business classes together. He’s literally a genius. Very handy guy to have around when you’ve got a paper due.” Kane gave a semblance of his old smile, but it soon faded. “I don’t know how I would have gotten through those last couple of months of college without him.”
Ellen held her breath. This was the first time he’d voluntarily brought up that period in his life.
“After the funeral, and that press conference,” he went on, “he sat with me in my dorm room for two weeks, watching movies and drinking whatever made me drunk the quickest.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Better than years of therapy. The hangover was, too.”
